How to use Digital Signage

Heard good things about digital signage, but not sure how to use it in your business? Already using digital signage, but wondering whether you could do more with it? Here we look at how to make the most of digital signage in any environment.

Digital signage gives you a whole new way to reach your audience. To use it effectively, you need to make some important decisions about what your signage displays will show and where they should be installed. However, before you can get stuck in to all that, you need to be clear about what you want your signage to do. In this section, we take a step back and look at the main reasons for using digital signage.

Like any other type of advertising, you can use digital signage to make people aware of your products and services. Unlike static ads, with digital, you can program your signage to show different adverts at different times, when they are most relevant. For example, drink offers during happy hour, breakfast offers during the morning commute. You can also link adverts to your stock levels, so show offers for perishable products when they are about to reach their sell-by date.

Perhaps the most obvious way to use digital signage is to give people the information and directions they need. A typical example is departures and arrivals information at an airport or a train station, or an interactive map in a shopping centre, but you can also use this in an office to help visitors. If you make digital signage part of your reception desk, you can use it to welcome people and give them information about how to get to their appointment, as well as interesting facts about your brand.

In the competition that bricks-and-mortar retailers have with online-only retailers, digital signage can be a powerful weapon. You can use digital installations to grab attention and make a store fun to visit. Playing high quality video content at an impressive scale can draw people in and increase their dwell time.

You can also include interactive screens so that people can find out more about the products and promotions in-store, but also see and order your whole online inventory, making your shop both a shop and a showroom.

Digital signage gives you some new ways to engage people with your brand. Whether it’s with video, touchscreen or interaction with smartphones via NFC or QR codes, using signage to entertain with games, competitions and freebies is a powerful way to build brand relationships.

So far, we’ve talked about ways to engage with an outside audience, but digital signage is just as useful for talking to your team and keeping them up to date with company news and results. Don’t wait for company meetings to let everyone know about big customer wins or positive feedback on social media, put it on a screen in a communal area. It’s likely to get more cut through than a HR email that might get ignored when people are busy. You can put it in an area where employees have time to look at it, dead time in a canteen queue, or in the kitchen waiting for the microwave to ping.

Deciding on what you want your digital signage to do will help you to make some of those decisions we mentioned in the intro about how to set up your signage solution. For example, which locations you choose for your displays will depend on where your audience will be when they are most receptive. Where will they have down-time? Where will they be making their buying decision? When do they need the information you can give them?

Here’s an overview of things to consider:

• What to show: your content is where your digital signage will succeed or fail. Bearing in mind what you want it to achieve and who your audience is, give lots of thought to the tone and the format.
• When to show it: are your messages time sensitive? Will you get good results if you change your content based on weather, sporting events or the news? Look for a content management system that makes it easy to do this.
• How long to show your content: You want to show your message for long enough for it to be read and absorbed, but not for so long that it becomes boring or invisible.
• Where to install your displays: where will your audience be? Where will they be bored? Where will they be making the decisions you care about? Where’s your last chance to catch them?
• What displays to use: Are you adding interactivity, or can you go for something simpler and cheaper?

Once you have a solid plan, you can start to think about the nuts and bolts, the hardware and software you need to achieve your goals. Wherever you are in your planning, even if you have hardware already, we can help you to design a digital signage system that’s flexible, responsive and easy to update. Contact our team of experts for some free advice.